I wonder why religious conservatives are mostly synonymous with capitalism supporters ? I mean arent most religions inherently socialistic ? What makes conservatives support capitalism , despite not being among the rich?

  • Bartsbigbugbag@lemmy.ml
    17·
    11 months ago

    I didn’t check all of the comments, but most of the ones I saw were really poor jokes or just plain wrong. The reason that religion is so tied into conservatism goes back to Nixon, and the attempts made by Roger Ailes and others, including Ronald Reagan, to make sure a right wing president could never be held accountable again. This included a meeting with Reagan and hundreds of pastors in which they literally trained the pastors on how to convert their congregations to the rights hateful rhetoric, a big part of which was the demonization of abortion and the lionization of “the free market”.

    • ssboomman@lemm.ee
      9·
      11 months ago

      While I don’t doubt this happened, this isn’t the first real link between capitalism and religion, specifically Christianity. It can actually go way further back, like to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Capitalism was beginning to take on its early forms, and doing what capitalism does best, which is reinforcing currently existing social hierarchies. When European ‘ancient farmers’ came over to the americas they needed labor, and ended up using Africans. Problem was, under English common law you weren’t supposed to own christian slaves. (Some slaves actually used this defense to escape slavery see Elizabeth key), and the region where slavery first popped off was Angola which was a largely christian country, so the colonies detached themselves from English comon law (which was one of the many stepping stones leading up to the American revolution) and changes various rules so that they could. That way they can keep holding slaves while using their religion to justify what they were doing. Religion was used to bolster capitalism, capitalism made religions people rich.

      Abrahamic religions (as are most organized religions) are insanely heiarchical. Like we said before, capitalism has a habit of reinforcing those social heiarchies, so it’s not really that surprising that there a huge overlap there. Just like there’s a huge overlap between billionaires and capitalism supporters, or landlords and anti-union support.